[1] In order to preserve the local colour, the Translator has
occasionally left a word or phrase of the MS. in the original Russian.
[2] Dissenters.
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X
"INCURABLE"
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X
"INCURABLE"
"_Cast off among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave.
Whom Thou rememberest no more, and they are cut off from Thy
hand. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in dark places, in
the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me and Thou hast afflicted
me with all Thy waves. Thou hast put mine acquaintance far from
me; Thou hast made me an abomination unto them; I am shut up and
I cannot come forth. Mine eye wasteth away by reason of
affliction. I have called daily upon Thee, O Lord, I have spread
forth my hands unto Thee._"--Eighty-eighth Psalm.
There was a restless air about the Refuge. In a few minutes the
friends of the patients would be admitted. The Incurables would hear
the latest gossip of the Ghetto, for the world was still very much
with these abortive lives, avid of sensations, Jewish to the end. It
was an unpretentious institution--two corner houses knocked
together--near the east lung of London; supported mainly by the poor
at a penny a week, and scarcely recognized by the rich; so that
paraplegia and vertigo and rachitis and a dozen other hopeless
diseases knocked hopelessly at its narrow portals. But it was a model
institution all the same, and the patients lacked for nothing except
freedom from pain. There was even a miniature synagogue for their
spiritual needs, with the women's compartment religiously railed off
from the men's, as if these grotesque ruins of sex might still
distract each other's devotions.
Yet the Rabbis knew human nature. The sprightly, hydrocephalous,
paralytic Leah had had the chair she inhabited carried down into the
men's sitting-room to beguile the moments, and was smiling
fascinatingly upon the deaf blind man, who had the Braille Bible at
his fingers' ends, and read on as stolidly as St. Anthony. Mad Mo had
strolled vacuously into the ladies' ward, and, indifferent to the
pretty white-aproned Christian nurses, was loitering by the side of a
weird, hatchet-faced cripple with a stiletto-shaped nose supporting
big spectacles. Like most of the patients she was up and dressed; only
a few of the white pallets ranged along the walls were occupied.
"Leah says she'd be quite happy if she could walk like you," said Mad
Mo in complimentary tones. "She always says Milly walks so beautiful.
She says you can walk the whole length of the garden." Milly, huddled
in her chair, smiled miserably.
"You're crying again, Rebecca," protested a dark-eyed, bright-faced
dwarf in excellent English, as she touched her friend's withered hand.
"You are in the blues again. Why, that page is all blistered."
"No--I feel so nice," said the sad-eyed Russian in her quaint musical
accent. "You sall not tink I cry because I am not happy. Ven I read
sad tings--like my life--den only I am happy."
The dwarf gave a short laugh that made her pendent earrings oscillate.
"I thought you were brooding over your love affairs," she said.
"Me!" cried Rebecca. "I lost too young my leg to be in love. No, it is
Psalm eighty-eight dat I brood over. 'I am afflicted and ready to die
from my yout' up.' Yes, I vas only a girl ven I had to go to
Koenigsberg to find a doctor to cut off my leg. 'Lover and friend hast
dou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness!'"
Her face shone ecstatic.
"Hush!" whispered the dwarf, with a warning nudge and a slight nod in
the direction of a neighbouring waterbed on which a pale, rigid,
middle-aged woman lay, with shut sleepless eyes.
"Se cannot understand Englis'," said the Russian girl proudly.
"Don't be so sure, look how the nurses here have picked up Yiddish!"
Rebecca shook her head incredulously. "Sarah is a Polis' woman," she
said. "For years dey are in England and dey learn noting."
"_Ick bin krank! Krank! Krank!_" suddenly moaned a shrivelled Polish
grandmother--an advanced centenarian--as if to corroborate the girl's
contention. She was squatting monkey-like on her bed, every now and
again murmuring her querulous burden of sickness, and jabbering at
the nurses to shut all the windows. Fresh air she objected to as
vehemently as if it were butter or some other heterodox dainty.
Hard upon her crooning came bloodcurdling screams from the room above,
sounds that reminded the visitor he was not in a "Barnum" show, that
the monstrosities were genuine. Pretty Sister Margaret--not yet
indurated--thrilled with pity, as before her inner vision rose the
ashen perspiring face of the palsied sufferer, who sat quivering all
the long day in an easy-chair, her swollen jelly-like hands resting on
cotton-wool pads, an air-pillow between her knees, her whole frame
racked at frequent intervals by fierce spasms of pain, her only
diversion faint blurred reflections of episodes of the street in the
glass of a framed picture; yet morbidly suspicious of slow poison in
her drink, and cursed with an incurable vitality.
Meantime Sarah lay silent, bitter thoughts moving beneath her white,
impassive face like salt tides below a frozen surface. It was a
strong, stern face, telling of a present of pain, and faintly hinting
at a past of prettiness. She seemed alone in the populated ward, and
indeed the world was bare for her. Most of her life had been spent in
the Warsaw Ghetto, where she was married at sixteen, nineteen years
before. Her only surviving son--a youth whom the English atmosphere
had not improved--had sailed away to trade with the Kaffirs. And her
husband had not been to see her for a fortnight!
When the visitors began to arrive, her torpor vanished. She eagerly
raised the half of her that was not paralyzed, partially sitting up.
But gradually expectation died out of her large gray eyes. There was a
buzz of talk in the room--the hydrocephalous girl was the gay centre
of a group; the Polish grandmother who cursed her grandchildren when
they didn't come and when they did, was denouncing their neglect of
her to their faces; everybody had somebody to kiss or quarrel with.
One or two acquaintances approached the bed-ridden wife, too, but she
would speak no word, too proud to ask after her husband, and wincing
under the significant glances occasionally cast in her direction. By
and by she had the red screen placed round her bed, which gave her
artificial walls and a quasi-privacy. Her husband would know where to
look for her--
"Woe is me!" wailed her centenarian country-woman, rocking to and fro.
"What sin have I committed to get such grandchildren? You only come to
see if the old grandmother isn't dead yet. So sick! So sick! So sick!"
Twilight filled the wards. The white beds looked ghostly in the
darkness. The last visitor departed. Sarah's husband had not yet come.
"He is not well, Mrs. Kretznow," Sister Margaret ventured to say in
her best Yiddish. "Or he is busy working. Work is not so slack any
more." Alone in the institution she shared Sarah's ignorance of the
Kretznow scandal. Talk of it died before her youth and sweetness.
"He would have written," said Sarah sternly. "He is awearied of me. I
have lain here a year. Job's curse is on me."
"Shall I to him"--Sister Margaret paused to excogitate the Yiddish
word--"write?"
"No! He hears me knocking at his heart."
They had flashes of strange savage poetry, these crude yet complex
souls. Sister Margaret, who was still liable to be startled, murmured
feebly, "But--"
"Leave me in peace!" with a cry like that of a wounded animal.
The matron gently touched the novice's arm and drew her away. "_I_
will write to him," she whispered.
Night fell, but sleep fell only for some. Sarah Kretznow tossed in a
hell of loneliness. Ah, surely her husband had not forgotten
her--surely she would not lie thus till death--that far-off death her
strong religious instinct would forbid her hastening! She had gone
into the Refuge to save him the constant sight of her helplessness and
the cost of her keep. Was she now to be cut off forever from the sight
of his strength?
The next day he came--by special invitation. His face was sallow,
rimmed with swarthy hair; his under lip was sensuous. He hung his
head, half veiling the shifty eyes.
Sister Margaret ran to tell his wife. Sarah's face sparkled.
"Put up the screen!" she murmured, and in its shelter drew her
husband's head to her bosom and pressed her lips to his hair.
But he, surprised into indiscretion, murmured: "I thought thou wast
dying."
A beautiful light came into the gray eyes.
"Thy heart told thee right, Herzel, my life. I _was_ dying--for a
sight of thee."
"But the matron wrote to me pressingly," he blurted out. He felt her
breast heave convulsively under his face; with her hands she thrust
him away.
"God's fool that I am--I should have known; to-day is not visiting
day. They have compassion on me--they see my sorrows--it is public
talk."
His pulse seemed to stop. "They have talked to thee of me," he
faltered.
"I did not ask their pity. But they saw how I suffered--one cannot
hide one's heart."
"They have no right to talk," he muttered in sulky trepidation.
"They have every right," she rejoined sharply. "If thou hadst come to
see me even once--why hast thou not?"
"I--I--have been travelling in the country with cheap jewellery. The
tailoring is so slack."
"Look me in the eyes! Law of Moses? No, it is a lie. God shall forgive
thee. Why hast thou not come?"
"I have told thee."
"Tell that to the Sabbath Fire-Woman! Why hast thou not come? Is it so
very much to spare me an hour or two a week? If I could go out like
some of the patients, I would come to thee. But I have tired thee out
utterly--"
"No, no, Sarah," he murmured uneasily.
"Then why--?"
He was covered with shame and confusion. His face was turned away. "I
did not like to come," he said desperately.
"Why not?" Crimson patches came and went on her white cheeks; her
heart beat madly.
"Surely thou canst understand!"
"Understand what? I speak of green and thou answerest of blue!"
"I answer as thou askest."
"Thou answerest not at all."
"No answer is also an answer," he snarled, driven to bay. "Thou
understandest well enough. Thyself saidst it was public talk."
"Ah--h--h!" in a stifled shriek of despair. Her intuition divined
everything. The shadowy, sinister suggestions she had so long beat
back by force of will took form and substance. Her head fell back on
the pillow, the eyes closed.
He stayed on, bending awkwardly over her.
"So sick! So sick! So sick!" moaned the wizened grandmother.
"Thou sayest they have compassion on thee in their talk," he murmured
at last, half deprecatingly, half resentfully; "have they none on me?"
Her silence chilled him. "But _thou_ hast compassion, Sarah," he
urged. "_Thou_ understandest."
Presently she reopened her eyes.
"Thou art not gone?" she murmured.
"No--thou seest I am not tired of thee, Sarah, my life! Only--"
"Wilt thou wash my skin, and not make me wet?" she interrupted
bitterly. "Go home. Go home to her!"
"I will not go home."
"Then go under like Korah."
He shuffled out. That night her lonely hell was made lonelier by the
opening of a peep-hole into Paradise--a paradise of Adam and Eve and
forbidden fruit. For days she preserved a stony silence toward the
sympathy of the inmates. Of what avail words against the flames of
jealousy in which she writhed?
He lingered about the passage on the next visiting day, vaguely
remorseful, but she would not see him. So he went away, vaguely
indignant, and his new housemate comforted him, and he came no more.
When you lie on your back all day and all night you have time to
think, especially if you do not sleep. A situation presents itself in
many lights from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn. One such light
flashed on the paradise, and showed it to her as but the portico of
purgatory. Her husband would be damned in the next world, even as she
was in this. His soul would be cut off from among its people.
On this thought she brooded till it loomed horribly in her darkness.
And at last she dictated a letter to the matron, asking Herzel to come
and see her.
He obeyed, and stood shame-faced at her side, fidgeting with his
peaked cap. Her hard face softened momentarily at the sight of him,
her bosom heaved, suppressed sobs swelled her throat.
"Thou hast sent for me?" he murmured.
"Yes--perhaps thou didst again imagine I was on my death-bed!" she
replied, with bitter irony.
"It is not so, Sarah. I would have come of myself--only thou wouldst
not see my face."
"I have seen it for twenty years--it is another's turn now."
He was silent.
"It is true all the same--I am on my death-bed."
He started. A pang shot through his breast. He darted an agitated
glance at her face.
"Is it not so? In this bed I shall die. But God knows how many years I
shall lie in it."
Her calm gave him an uncanny shudder.
"And till the Holy One, blessed be He, takes me, thou wilt live a
daily sinner."
"I am not to blame. God has stricken me. I am a young man."
"Thou art to blame!" Her eyes flashed fire. "Blasphemer! Life is sweet
to thee--yet perchance thou wilt die before me."
His face grew livid. "I am a young man," he repeated tremulously.
"Dost thou forget what Rabbi Eliezer said? 'Repent one day before thy
death'--that is to-day, for who knows?"
"What wouldst thou have me do?"
"Give up--"
"No, no," he interrupted. "It is useless. I cannot. I am so lonely."
"Give up," she repeated inexorably, "thy wife."
"What sayest thou? My wife! But she is not my wife. Thou art my wife."
"Even so. Give me up. Give me _Get_ (divorce)."
His breath failed, his heart thumped at the suggestion.
"Give thee _Get_!" he whispered.
"Yes. Why didst thou not send me a bill of divorcement when I left thy
home for this?"